Performance Tool Best Practices

Dashboards, Scorecards and other performance tools deliver mission-critical enterprise information in an easy-to-understand and highly visual electronic format for convenient and timely reporting. Designed to help enterprises improve performance, scorecards provide a comprehensive, holistic view of the organisation, beyond key financial and operational data.

These intuitive, visual displays highlight areas of success for setting internal benchmarks and also spotlight areas of concern that require individuals to take immediate action.

Best practice in developing effective scorecards include:

Make Scorecards An Enterprise Capability

Top Down - Start with the big picture - scorecards should cascade right down through the organisation to provide users with drill down capability from enterprise view to operational process view.

Scalability - scorecards and dashboards should be available to all users of the organisation and extend beyond the corporate walls to third party partners.

Personalization - one dataset view should be customisable by users using parameters and filters

Views Management - views should be controlled by role, and cascade down from that role to subordinate views. These views are controlled by user login rules.

Complete Data View - all transactional data and all other data contributing to KPI's should be available to scorecards and dashboards. Such data should be aggregated in a seperate data warehouse, distinct from transactional databases.

KPI's Support Corporate Strategy

Corporate strategy should be reflected in the KP's used and presented on scorecards and dashboards.

Consistency - KPI's should be consistent across different business intelligence applications, making them usable.

Extensibility And Flexibility - KPI's must be capable of being extended and changed as the corporate strategy changes.

Functional Libaries - KPI's are mostly functional computations of several datasets. These functions should be stored in libraries for reuse in different applications.

Usability

Visibility - Dashboard and scorecard design should be such that KPI's are clearly visible and distinct from each other.

Personalisation - BI tools should ideally be customisable using filters by users

Accessible - dashboards and scorecards should be accessible both within the corporate network and beyond the DMZ using extranets.

Analytical - analytical investigation using drill downs, slicing and dicing and ad hoc queries must be instantly available using web interfaces.

Meaninful - scoreboards and dashboards must contain meaningful, timely information as it pertains to the monitoring of activities relating to each role, and support normal decisions common to that role.